1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a character processing apparatus and a method therefor, for providing a character pattern of high quality by converting intersecting stroke data into non-intersecting outline data.
2. Related Background Art
In case of generating a large-sized character or an outlined character from a character of intersecting strokes, the data of intersecting strokes have to be converted into data of the non-intersecting entire outline before the generation process. For this purpose there has been employed a process of generating bit map data from the stroke data and tracing the outline of such bit map data thereby obtaining the coordinate data of the entire outline.
In order to improve the quality of the large-sized character or the outlined character, the outline has to be traced after the bit map is generated in the desired output size, so that there is involved a long processing time.
The generation of the bit map is sometimes limited to a certain size because of the limitation in the capacity of the bit map developing memory. In such case, for obtaining a character of a larger size, there is inevitably required an expansion of the coordinate values obtained from the generated outline, so that the deterioration of the image quality is inevitable depending on the memory capacity.
On the other hand, for achieving high-speed processing, there has been employed a method of forming a bit map image of a small size, tracing the outline of such bit map image to obtain the coordinates of the entire outline and expanding or reducing the obtained coordinates. In such case significant deterioration in quality is unavoidable in the large-sized output character.